Inflated Perceptions of Normal Wealth Make Americans Scramble

There’s an interesting entry over at the
Living on
Less blog today. It discusses
how exaggerated the perception of wealth is in the United States and how it is
that even relatively well-off people have the impression that they’re falling
behind as they scramble to try to live an artificially expensive lifestyle
they feel they should be able to afford.

In other words, less than I earned, tax-free, this year. The author goes on to
talk about why so many people think “that owning a new car, a house in the
suburbs [which can easily cost half a million dollars!], and expensive
gadgetry like big screen TVs, palm pilots,
cell phones, etc.
is the affordable norm for the average person.” Not surprisingly, advertising
and “lifestyle” reporting is blamed (One note: “Not long ago, the
Today show presented the following: the results of
a survey by a travel magazine on its readers’ favorite vacations [favorite
destination: Sydney, Australia; favorite hotel: some Beverly Hills hotel whose
rooms cost $350 a night], and a feature on new leisure boats available for
sale [least expensive boat: a catamaran for $5000; most expensive boat: a
yacht for $300,000]. The New York Times travel
section stated recently that vacationing on a yacht is no longer just for the
rich: a one-week vacation is available on a rented yacht for a mere $4800!”).

This mass hallucination even reaches, sadly, to the war tax resistance
movement — which often makes tax resistance through income lowering sound like
a frightening plunge into the depths of deprivation. Take, for instance, the
2003 edition of the War Resisters League book
War Tax Resistance, which has this caveat about
that form of tax resistance:

For most people in this country, this is not a realistic option, and it
leaves them little room to incorporate war tax resistance into their lives.
Promotion of this method may discourage people who might otherwise be
sympathetic to war tax resistance.

As I’ve noted often in the last couple of weeks, about 25% of the people who
file income tax returns in the United States are already living below
the tax line. So it’s absurd to say that a lifestyle that is already being
practiced by a quarter of us is “not a realistic option” for “most people in
this country.” But even people in the war tax resistance movement, who should
know better, have an unrealistic view both of how much you can earn and still
stay below the tax line, and of how far such an income puts you from relative
or absolute poverty.

I refused to pay my taxes this year out of
absolute moral distaste. I also asked the
IRS if
they could provide legal assurance that paying taxes would not leave me open
to prosecution under the
Nuremberg
Principles. The
IRS
replied that they could not provide a quick response to my letter since they
had received “a large number of similar requests.”

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